PERIOD MAPPINGS AND PERIOD DOMAINS

by JAMES CARLSON

The concept of a period of an elliptic integral goes back to the 18th century. Later Abel, Gauss, Jacobi, Legendre, Weierstrass and others made a systematic study of these integrals. Rephrased in modern terminology, these give a way to encode how the complex structure of a two-torus varies, thereby showing that certain families contain all elliptic curves. Generalizing to higher dimensions resulted in the formulation of the celebrated Hodge conjecture, and in an attempt to solve this, Griffiths generalized the classical notion of period matrix and introduced period maps and period domains...

See on goodreads | librarything